Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Microsoft Defender for IoT comparison

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Microsoft Defender for IoT

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Helped 842,466 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Vulnerability Management (7th), Container Management (9th), Container Security (4th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (4th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (3rd), Compliance Management (2nd)

Microsoft Defender for IoT

Ranking in Microsoft Security Suite

29th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IoT Security (5th), Operational Technology (OT) Security (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Microsoft Security Suite category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Cloud is 6.8%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Defender for IoT is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Microsoft Security Suite

Featured Reviews

Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps

Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.

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William Tuleja

Senior Endpoint Engineer at a university with 501-1,000 employees

Integration with existing tools boosts management efficiency

The only improvement I see is that some detection explanations are vaguely provided by Microsoft, resulting in generic IoT detections that alert me to an issue yet don't specify what's wrong. Often, it just links back to a generic KB article without additional information. When it happens, it requires extra detective work. This issue doesn't occur often but can be annoying.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"One important security feature is the incident alerts. Now, with all these cyberattacks, there are a lot of incident alerts that get triggered. It is very difficult to keep monitoring everything automatically, instead our organization is utilizing the automated use case that we get from Microsoft. That has helped bring down the manual work for a lot of things."

"Provides a very good view of the entire security setup of your organization."

"The solution's coordinated detection and response across devices and identities is impressive because it is complete."

"The most valuable feature is the regulatory compliance aspect, where we utilize predefined initiatives like NIST."

"The solution's robust security posture is the most valuable feature."

"The solution is used for risks, vulnerabilities, and compliance."

"I've seen benefits since implementing Microsoft Defender for Cloud. It's easy to manage for our large organization as an endpoint security solution. It integrates well with Office 365 and Windows 11, which is better than before. Patching, updates, and threat protection are all handled together now. Its AI features help predict threats."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps in improving our overall security posture. We have a nice overview of what is missing where and what can be improved."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

"I find Microsoft Defender very effective in vulnerability management and it provides good attack reduction, making it a next-generation protection solution."

"I believe it is best suited for cloud services and is unmatched by other cloud security solutions."

"Mainly, it is manageable and integrates with other Microsoft products, which is crucial for me."

"It is manageable and integrates with other Microsoft products, which is crucial for me."

Cons

"For improvements, I'd like to see more use cases integrated with Microsoft Sentinel and support for multi-cloud environments beyond just Azure."

"I would rate Microsoft Defender for Cloud a six out of 10 due to its lack of necessary features to operate as a standalone solution."

"For Kubernetes, I was using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). To see that whatever is getting deployed into AKS goes through the correct checks and balances in terms of affinities and other similar aspects and follows all the policies, we had to use a product called Stackrox. At a granular level, the built-in policies were good for Kubernetes, but to protect our containers from a coding point of view, we had to use a few other products. For example, from a programming point of view, we were using Checkmarx for static code analysis. For CIS compliance, there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, we had to use other plugins to see that the CIS benchmarks are compliant. There are CIS benchmarks for Kubernetes on AWS and GCP, but there are no CIS benchmarks for AKS. So, Azure Security Center fell short from the regulatory compliance point of view, and we had to use one more product. We ended up with two different dashboards. We had Azure Security Center, and we had Stackrox that had its own dashboard. The operations team and the security team had to look at two dashboards, and they couldn't get an integrated piece. That's a drawback of Azure Security Center. Azure Security Center should provide APIs so that we can integrate its dashboard within other enterprise dashboards, such as the PowerBI dashboard. We couldn't get through these aspects, and we ended up giving Reader security permission to too many people, which was okay to some extent, but when we had to administer the users for the Stackrox portal and Azure Security Center, it became painful."

"The pricing could be improved, as it is somewhat high for smaller companies."

"The most significant areas for improvement are in the security of our identity and endpoints and the posture of the cloud environment. Better protection for our cloud users and cloud apps is always welcome."

"It's hard to reach someone who understands my problems. I haven't had many issues, so I haven't called them."

"I would like to see more connectors and plugins with other platforms."

"I recommend that they extend the scope for legacy infra assets."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

"The only improvement I see is that some detection explanations are vaguely provided by Microsoft, resulting in generic IoT detections that alert me to an issue yet don't specify what's wrong."

"Customer service and support from Microsoft are costly. The execution by engineers is expensive, and the service is neither free nor toll-free, making it less accessible for customers."

"The only improvement I see is that some detection explanations are vaguely provided by Microsoft, resulting in generic IoT detections that alert me to an issue yet don't specify what's wrong."

"The primary area that needs improvement is compatibility with the latest IoT technologies."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud is pricey, especially for Kubernetes clusters."

"Pricing depends on your workload size, but it is very cheap. If you're talking about virtual machines, it is $5 or something for each machine, which is minimal. If you go for some agent-based solution for every virtual machine, then you need to pay the same thing or more than that. For an on-premises solution like this, we were paying around $30 to $50 based on size. With Defender, Microsoft doesn't bother about the size. You pay based on the number of machines. So, if you have 10 virtual machines, and 10 virtual machines are being monitored, you are paying based on that rather than the size of the virtual machine. Thus, you are paying for the number of units rather than paying for the size of your units."

"Pricing is a consideration, but we strive to keep costs low by enabling only necessary services."

"I am not involved much with the pricing but the bundle offering is good."

"It is bundled with our enterprise subscription, which makes it easy to go for it. It is available by default, and there is no extra cost for using the standard features."

"Microsoft's licensing and pricing are sometimes complicated. If someone is new to Microsoft's licensing, they might have difficulty with it."

"The pricing and licensing of Microsoft Defender for Cloud have been good for us. We appreciate the licensing approach based on employee count rather than a big enterprise license."

"The licensing cost per server is $15 per month."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Energy/Utilities Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening across your ecosystem. It also has great remote workforce capabilities and supports a...

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The licensing is straightforward but can become expensive if you cover everything. You must balance the cost against the importance of what needs covering.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for IoT?

The solution is relatively expensive with licensing being based on each device. The cost per license might not be affordable for every organization, and I would rate it around six out of ten on a s...

What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for IoT?

The primary area that needs improvement is compatibility with the latest IoT technologies. Microsoft needs flexibility to ensure good compatibility with new IoT solutions, which frequently introduc...

What is your primary use case for Microsoft Defender for IoT?

My primary use case for Microsoft Defender for IoT is security. It helps with vulnerability management and provides significant attack reduction. It functions as a next-generation protection soluti...

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

Palo Alto Networks IoT Security vs Microsoft Defender for IoT

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Download Microsoft Defender for Cloud product report

IoT Security

Download Microsoft Defender for IoT product report

Also Known As

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

Azure Defender for IoT

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Overview

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Microsoft Defender for IoT offers advanced security designed to protect IoT environments from sophisticated threats. Its deep integration with Azure reinforces security across devices and networks.

Microsoft Defender for IoT provides scalable threat detection and security intelligence tailored for IoT devices. Leveraging cloud-powered analytics, it ensures protection against emerging threats while supporting diverse device landscapes. The platform's compatibility with Azure Sentinel offers robust security operations and management capabilities.

What are the core features of Microsoft Defender for IoT?

Threat Intelligence: Provides real-time insights and threat detection using cloud-powered analytics.
Device Management: Simplifies the monitoring and management of IoT devices across networks.
Integrated Security: Seamlessly integrates with Azure Sentinel for comprehensive security operations.

What benefits and ROI should users consider?

Improved Security Posture: Strengthens the protection of IoT ecosystems against cyber threats.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces the complexities and costs associated with managing IoT security.
Scalability: Supports growth and adaptation to expanding IoT networks.

In manufacturing, Microsoft Defender for IoT aids in maintaining operational efficiency by preventing unauthorized access to industrial control systems. Healthcare providers utilize it to protect sensitive patient data transmitted through connected devices. Retailers benefit from secure management of inventory systems and customer data across smart devices.

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

Information Not Available

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Microsoft Defender for IoT